As a broadband access technology, the digital subscriber line (DSL) has been widely applied. Based on various applications of the broadband access technology, for example, voice over IP (VoIP) and IP television (IPTV), various IP-based terminal devices are required. Those terminal devices are IP application terminals, known as customer premises equipments (CPEs) in the industry. An auto-configuration server (ACS) performs remote automatic configuration on each CPE and provides corresponding management functions.
In the current device management and automatic configuration framework, the CPE serves as a client and is a managed device; the ACS serves as a server and is a managing device. Both the CPE and the ACS provide some methods for each other to call. To call a method of a remote device is to send a specific message to the device and wait for the result returned by the device after the device responds to the message. Generally the ACS uses various remote procedure call (RPC) methods to configure CPE related parameters (nodes). A parameter (node) on the CPE can be uniquely identified by a path of the parameter (node), where the path is from the root to the parameter (node). A parameter (node) is an object. An object may further include one or multiple object instances, and the corresponding instance label (InstanceNumber) can be allocated by the CPE.
In the prior art, because the instance label of the same object instance varies on different CPEs, index labels can be used on the ACS to differentiate various object instances on the CPEs, and the corresponding messages of various object instances sent from the ACS to the CPEs carry corresponding index labels. In this way, the CPEs can maintain the mapping relationships between instance labels and index labels of object instances. When the ACS intends to manage the same object instance on multiple CPEs, because the same object instance uses the same index label and the CPEs store the mapping relationships between index labels and instance labels, the ACS can manage the same object instance on multiple CPEs uniformly by using the index label.
The method for managing object instances in the prior art has the following defects: Though a CPE stores the mapping relationships between index labels and instance labels, the ACS cannot determine whether a specific index label corresponds to an instance label stored on the CPE, and cannot determine the mapping relationships of which index labels and instance labels are stored on the CPE. When the CPE does not store the mapping relationship between a specific index label and an instance label, the ACS fails to perform batch configuration on the object instance corresponding to the index label on the CPE; when a non-ACS entity (a user or a third-party entity) deletes the object instance corresponding to the index label, the ACS cannot know the information, and the ACS fails to perform batch configuration on the deleted object instance corresponding to the index label on the CPE, thus reducing the success ratio of configuration.